I’m trying to understand what exactly precompiling:assets does, because I’ve realized that for my last project my CSS would never update when I pushed my app to heroku unless I typed bundle exec rake assets:precompile, but this only started happening towards the end, so I believe I probably added something to the config file.
I’m currently trying to understand caching, which made me think about precompile:assets. Is precompile:assets similar to caching by pre-loading the assets to the web server so that those assets aren’t loaded directly from the Rails stack? This is for performance purposes right?
Caching is a related, but separate topic.
The purpose of compiling assets includes the combining and minimizing of assets, e.g. javascript that is all on 1 line with 1 letter variables, as opposed to the originals which are used in development mode and let you debug there using the original source code.